Personal NoteIn August of 2011, two screws were protruding into the skin on Erika's upper
back. In Boston, her surgeon removed some metal rods near her neck in hopes that
the bone had sufficiently healed. Apparently the bone was too weak to support
itself, and Erika ended up with three cracked vertebrae. Surgeons then went back
and added metal rods and screws in the upper part of her back.

Then in September 2011 she broke two rods in her lower back.
Surgeons then repaired those rods on September 29 and added new support rods

Tomorrow Erika has the stitches removed from the 18-inch incision in her
back. After having 15 spine surgeries I requested that the surgeons make her
life easier by just installing Velcro.

Her X-ray images make her spine look like it was built with an Erector
set. Her surgeon says that there are two kinds of orthopedic surgeons. Many
were former jocks in part because it takes strength and endurance for some
types of orthopedic surgeries (Erika had one surgery where she was on the
table for 14 hours). The other type of orthopedic surgeon is the type that
liked to build things as a kid and often took up engineering as an
undergraduate. The Stanford Medical School has various joint graduate
programs with the Engineering School --- which is one reason an MD degree
takes an extra year at Stanford.

The instruments table is similar to what one might find in a carpentry or
metal working shop --- drills, screws, saws, chisels, braces, etc. The
tension on the job in intense, because one wrong move and she's dead or
paralyzed. This is spine surgery Number 15 for Erika --- eight in San
Antonio, two in Concord, and five in Boston. Originally she injured her back
30 years ago while working as a nurse in an operating room. The surgeon
asked her to lift a 200 lb instruments table over a power cord during a
surgery on a man's back. They had to take Erika out of the operating room
and put her in traction for a month in the hospital. She's had much more
than her share of pain in life before and after commencing a succession of
surgeries.

But life is more precious when she has good days. Life has some weird
ways of making many people more appreciative of life and in testing courage,
faith, and endurance.

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Cranfield
uses its ‘Hot Topics’ videos to get a message across; one video = one
message. Current ones can be accessed at
http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/p14679/Knowledge-Interchange/Hot-Topics
Or the sidebar on the left lists the lot by subject. For example, mine are
under ‘business, economics and finance’. (The latest was when I got very
irritated about something the media were saying about bank privatisation
(back a couple of months ago, when we still believed the banks were worth
something – which just shows how lousy my forecasting skills are!), so I
phoned down to our media studio and asked if they could give me a slot to
sound off -
http://bit.ly/qGIAkj .)

The main
challenge is to get your message across quite quickly. We try to come in
under 5 minutes; I don’t think there are any at more than 10. Nothing too
long, as the view is that people’s attention spans on the net are very
short.

Some, like
this one, come about because a member of staff or a doctoral student has
something to say and wants a platform. Others come about because the studio
asks for a speaker on a topic in the news.

The other
thing which we have built up is a presence on iTunesU (under Cranfield
University) which I understand are building quite a following.

As to the
technicals – we do nothing complicated. An interviewer against a black
background. The interviewer is briefed; the interviewee talks freely. Some
people need editing, and others go out more or less ‘as is’.

Hope that
answers your question. All of our work is accessed through the Knowledge
Interchange on the School’s home page.

I added it to my listing of free
electronic textbooks. The problem with free electronic textbooks is that there's
not a whole lot of incentive for keeping them current. This is not so much of a
problem with basic textbooks in slow-changing disciplines like mathematics, but
it's a huge problem in fast-changing disciplines like financial accounting and
law.

Jensen Comment
Perhaps the best open sharing alternative for a free textbook in a a rapidly
changing discipline like intermediate accounting or a CPA review textbook would
be to model it after Wikipedia where the entire world is able to contribute new
and revised modules, including problem wikis and problem solution wikis.

There are many ways to describe the
federal government’s long-term fiscal challenge. One method for capturing
the challenge in a single number is to measure the “fiscal gap.” The fiscal
gap represents the difference, or gap, between revenue and spending in
present value terms over a certain period, such as 75 years, that would need
to be closed in order to achieve a specified debt level (e.g., today’s debt
to GDP ratio) at the end of the period.2 From the fiscal gap, one can
calculate the size of action needed—in terms of tax increases, spending
reductions, or, more likely, some combination of the two—to close the gap;
that is, for debt as a share of GDP to equal today’s ratio at the end of the
period. For example, under our Alternative simulation, the fiscal gap is 9.0
percent of GDP (or a little over $76 trillion in present value dollars) (see
table 2). This means that revenue would have to increase by about 50 percent
or noninterest spending would have to be reduced by 34 percent on average
over the next 75 years (or some combination of the two) to keep debt at the
end of the period from exceeding its level at the beginning of 2010 (53
percent of GDP).

Cost-benefit analysis has its place. But the
benefits of academic research can pop up in such unexpected ways, sometimes
immediately and sometimes after centuries. We should not set too much store by
any bureaucrat’s analysis of “academic impact”.Tim Hartford, "New Ways With Old
Numbers," TimHartford.com, September 24, 2011 ---
http://timharford.com/2011/09/new-ways-with-old-numbers/

But there is one thing about Zotero that has
bothered me. The problem is that the most intuitive way to take notes on a
source is to attach the note to the source. For example, see the screenshot
below, where I have a summary and a few topical notes about one book.

This is all well and good for certain types of
notes, such as summaries of books that I read for exams. It’s kind of like
scribbling marginalia in a book. But this method is not so good for other
types of notes, such as pieces of evidence or quotations. The problem is
that attaching notes to the source forces you to think about the source
first and then the idea encapsulated in the note, rather than the other way
round.

I first learned how to take scholarly notes on
index cards: one thought per card, with carefully marked keys to subjects
and sources. I still think that index cards have some virtues that digital
note-taking can’t beat. What I wanted from Zotero was a way to think about
notes that was more like the model of index cards and less like the model of
marginalia.

Lo and behold, Zotero had the necessary
functionality for years. The problem was not the capabilities of the
software, but the way I was thinking about taking notes.

What I do now is make a standalone note for each
thought or piece of evidence. But I also make the note a related item of the
source from which I got the idea. You can see in the screenshot below that
this standalone note is related to a book.

A few weeks ago, ProfHacker got a request asking us
if we could compare the two platforms, which gave me a great opportunity to
try to figure out why I prefer EndNote. In many ways, it comes down to the
fact that I’m very, very comfortable with EndNote. I started playing around
with it in my last year of undergraduate work (as a way to procrastinate
rather than actually writing papers), and I purchased a copy of the software
before starting graduate school (only to find out that my school had a site
license). I fastidiously created bibliographic entries for the reading I did
in seminars. I wrote abstracts for the articles. I learned how to create my
own styles. I took library workshops on the tool. So when it came time to
write my dissertation, EndNote was already well integrated into my workflow.
I began experimenting with Zotero in the fall of 2007 (a year after its
first release) and while I very much appreciated what it did, it wasn’t
enough to make me a convert.

Apart from my own level of comfort, however, I
wanted to know what the differences were between the two tools. In my
postdoc I regularly teach classes on both EndNote and Zotero, which means
that I think I’ve got a pretty good perspective on both tools. It must of
course be said that both tools work very well at their primary purposes:
managing references and creating citations and bibliographies within
documents. With that, then, I want to cover what I see to be the strengths
and key features of each platform. A couple of caveats: First, I’m not going
to cover everything that each tool does. My goal is to just touch on some
key differences that I’ve found for preferring one program over another.
Second, while I’m doing my best to represent the features of both EndNote
and Zotero, if I’ve missed something or gotten something just plain wrong,
please let me know in the comments!

Cost: Perhaps the strongest
selling point for Zotero is that it’s free. EndNote costs more than $100
for an educational license, and while in the grand scheme of things that
might not be too much, it’s certainly an impediment for grad students or
schools with limited resources. Winner? Zotero.

Collecting sources online: For
many academic databases, library catalogs, and even sites like Amazon or
The New York Times,
adding a resource to your Zotero library simply takes a single click. It
feels like magic the first time you do it, and it never stops feeling
like magic. In response, EndNote created
EndNote Web, which allows you install a
bookmarklet to capture sources. It works across all browsers, but it’s
nowhere near as robust nor does it capture information as well. Many
academic databases allow you to export search results directly into
EndNote, however. While it’s not quite as easy and simple as Zotero’s
implementation, it works just as well and takes only a few seconds
more. Winner? Zotero, by a hair.

Syncing:
With Zotero 2.0, it became possible to keep your entire library in sync
across all the computers you use. For many people, this is the most
important feature, since it means you can do your work wherever you are,
as long as you can install the Zotero plugin. EndNote Web is Thomson
Reuters’s response; along with the bookmarklet, there’s an entire
website where your sources are stored and which you can access wherever
you have an Internet connection. The problem is that EndNote Web does
not sync easily or well with your desktop library. So while you
can create citations from either EndNote Web or EndNote proper, you can
accidentally create differences between the two libraries. What’s more,
I find EndNote Web to be slow and to have an unintuitive user interface.
Zotero is just plain simpler for keeping everything together—plus since
the Zotero library is stored locally, it’s accessible even when you’re
not online. EndNote Web doesn’t do this. It’s worth mentioning that I’ve
created my own solution for syncing my EndNote library: ProfHacker faveDropbox.
By storing my EndNote library files in Dropbox,
they are kept in sync on all my computers and are stored locally. I just
have to make sure that I exit the program on one computer before
starting on another. Still, I have to give the edge to Zotero since its
syncing solution is native to the application. Winner?
Zotero.

Speed, overall: When I’m
writing, flow is really important. Getting the thoughts down as quickly
as they come is important, otherwise they’ll be long gone. Of course, I
also need to cite things as I go, since figuring out what needs
citations after the fact would be impossible. So the speed of the
application I’m using matters a lot to me. When it comes to simply
interacting with EndNote and Zotero, EndNote is just plain faster. Being
a stand-alone application rather than based in Firefox—even Firefox 4
(see
Amy’s quick review)—means that EndNote doesn’t
have to depend on other things. Zotero
Standalone is a possible solution
(and
Mark’s reviewpraises it), but for now…Winner?
EndNote.

Speed, inserting citations:
Getting citations added into your document is a big part of the speed of
using a tool. Both EndNote and Zotero have shortcut keys for inserting
citations. Zotero then opens a window which allows you to search for
your source, control how it appears, and then inserts the citation.
EndNote has a similar option to Find Citations, but it also has a
shortcut key that inserts whatever reference you currently have selected
in EndNote. By not having to go through a pop-up window, you can drop a
citation into EndNote much faster than you can with Zotero. Winner?EndNote.

Speed, editing citations: Not
all citation styles require the use of page numbers, but my primary
one—MLA—does. When I choose to insert citations into a document with
either Zotero or EndNote, then, I have to make sure that I add in page
numbers. Zotero includes an option to add page numbers in its Find/Add
Citation dialog. EndNote does not give you this option. It immediately
inserts and formats the citation, and you have to right-click and choose
to edit it to add a page number. When used conventionally, then, Zotero
is faster for adding page numbers. However, I’ve already said that I
hate the pop-up box. EndNote gives me the option of turning off instant
formatting. The result is that it drops snippets of code into the
document like this: {Breuer, 1955 #81}. It’s not as pretty, but it’s
super easy to add page numbers to this code: adding an “@” symbol plus
the page number(s) is all it takes, {Breuer, 1955 #81@27-31}.
Upon finishing the document, EndNote will convert this code into
citations. Admittedly, working with EndNote this way is a level of
citation ninja-ery that you might avoid. But it allows me to add in
citations and page numbers quickly while avoiding the pop-up box.
Winner? Zotero, for standard users; EndNote for advanced users.

Sharing sources with others:
It’s not uncommon for scholars to be protective of their sources while
writing, but there comes a point at either pre- or post-publication
where we want to share what we’ve discovered. Zotero makes it easy to
share sources with itsgroupsfeature. Adding sources to the group library is as
easy as dragging them from your library into the group folder. And since
groups can be private or public, you can even make the sources visible
online for people who don’t want to join a group. EndNote allows you to
share sources with others through EndNote Web. You can organize your
sources into groups and then share groups with different people. There
is no option to share sources publicly, and you have to manually add
users to share groups by email address. It’s not terribly difficult, but
it’s not implemented as well as Zotero’s sharing options. Winner?Zotero.

Writing with others: While
most of us most often do our writing by ourselves, there are projects
that require you to collaborate with one or more coauthors. Managing
bibliographies when working on the same document can be difficult.
EndNote and Zotero have very different solutions. EndNote creates a
“traveling
library” (scroll down after the link) embedded
in each Word document that contains all of your collaborator’s
bibliographic data and that can be imported into your own library. In
other words, the bibliography and citations can be formatted correctly
even if you don’t have access to the original records. Zotero’s groups,
on the other hand, allows you to cite from your group libraries and it’s
as easy as citing any other source with Zotero. Since I haven’t
actually done a large project using either tool, I’m going to resist
declaring a winner here.

Finding Full Text for Your Sources:
EndNote and Zotero can both help you manage your PDFs as well as your
citations. You can attach PDFs to source records, and the files then
live in your library. However, when you create records, you often do not
have the PDFs at hand. Zotero has a setting that directs it to
“automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving
items,” which always makes me think that it will download PDFs for me
when saving sources from databases. Since it never does this, I’m quite
sure that I misunderstand this setting; or perhaps it just doesn’t work
with the databases I frequent. EndNote, on the other hand, has a
built-in tool for finding full text versions of your sources. To have it
work most effectively, you will need to
configure it to go through your university’s database structure.
But once you’ve done that and authenticated, it
will scan your whole library to find either PDFs or URLs for your
sources. In my highly non-scientific tests, EndNote finds full text for
about 40% of the items I have in my library. It’s a whole lot better
than downloading them yourself, although the process is pretty slow.
Winner? EndNote.

Creating Sources from PDFs:
On the other hand, sometimes you have a folder full of PDFs that you’ve
collected and no metadata to go with them. Sure, you could enter that in
by hand, but can Zotero or EndNote help you out here? Both applications
have the ability to extract metadata from PDFs. For EndNote, you simply
choose to Import, point it at a folder, and choose the “PDF File or
Folder” import option. For Zotero, you can drag a PDF into your library,
right-click, and choose “Retrieve metadata for PDF.” In my experience,
EndNote has a hard time finding the metadata, but that very likely has
to do with my field of study, since EndNote depends here on
DOIs. Zotero, on the other hand,
works with Google Scholar and gets better
results for me. Aaron Tay, a librarian in Singapore,
ran some tests onPDF metadata extractionfor
EndNote and Zotero (as well as two other reference managers)` and also
found that Zotero came out on top. Winner? Zotero.

Customizability: Both Zotero
and EndNote ship with most of what you need built-in, including the
most-used styles and more fields for information than most people will
ever need. If you find that you need to add a new type of source or some
new fields for specific information that you need for your sources
(unique identifiers for your project, etc.), EndNote is much better
equipped to handle these needs: it has space for three new reference
types and eight fields of custom information. Winner? EndNote.

To sum up, then, here are what I see as the
different strengths of the two platforms:

I added it to my listing of free electronic textbooks. The problem with free
electronic textbooks is that there's not a whole lot of incentive for keeping
them current. This is not so much of a problem with basic textbooks in
slow-changing disciplines like mathematics, but it's a huge problem in
fast-changing disciplines like financial accounting and law.

Jensen Comment
Perhaps the best open sharing alternative for a free textbook in a a rapidly
changing discipline like intermediate accounting or a CPA review textbook would
be to model it after Wikipedia where the entire world is able to contribute new
and revised modules, including problem wikis and problem solution wikis.

The challenge of finding
a game for the classroomcan be difficult,
particularly when the games you’ve imagined doesn’t exist. And if you wait
for a particular challenge or topic to make its way into game form, it might
be a while. Educational games and “serious” games haven’t always kept up
with the rest of video gaming, in part because there’s no high return.
Modern game development tends towards large teams and impressive budgets,
and these resources are rarely used on explicitly educational productions.
While efforts like the
STEM Video Game Challengeprovide incentives for
new learning games, and commercial titles can often be
adapted for the classroom, there’s still more
potential than games have yet reached.

But if you have a new concept for playful learning,
you can still bring it to life for your classroom. There are two ways to
start thinking about making games in the classroom: the first is to build a
game yourself, and the second is to engage students in making games as a way
to express their own understanding.

You’re probably not
a game designer, although there’s a game for that:Gamestar Mechaniccan help you “level up” from player to designer. But
it’s also important to remember building games rarely happens alone: as with
digital humanities projects, games lend themselves to collaboration. If you
have a game design program (or even a single course) at your university or a
neighboring school, there might be an opportunity to partner your students
with them towards creating valuable content-based educational games.
Similarly, there may be other faculty who are interested in collaborating on
grant-funded projects to build new educational experiences, or collective
and expanding projects likeReacting
to the Past(which many readers cited as a
classroom game system of choice). You might also find collaborators,
inspiration and games in progress through communities such as Gameful,
a “secret HQ for making world-changing games”–and community manager Nathan
Maton has a few things to say about
building serious games for education.

There’s also a difference between making a game or
asking your students to make a game as an expression of content for
pedagogical purposes and making a game in the industry. Even a flawed game
can provide an opportunity for learning and discussion. And your students
will often bring a wealth of their own experiences with games to the
process, offering them a chance to make new connections with your course
material.

Ready to try making games? Here are a few tools for
getting started.

Board and card games can be a
great first project, particularly for students. Digital games are
flashy, but board and card games offer the advantages of structured play
with a lower barrier to entry. They can also be good practice for
learning the mechanics and structure of games
without getting bogged down in programming and logic. We’ve all played
some version of classroom jeopardy before, and it remains an example of
taking game-like mechanics and applying them to any content–but when
content guides the way, board games can transcend these roots.

Inform 7is a modern heir to text-based games, and it’s a
free development tool that’s perfect for interpreting and building
worlds without needing visual elements. Aaron Reed’s Creating
Interactive Fiction with Inform 7is a
thorough guide to the system. TheVoices of
Spoon RiverIF offers one example of literary
instruction through the form, while Nick Montfort’s Book
and Volume demonstrates the potential for
systematic logic. There’s even theECG Paper ChaseIF for a meta-experience on the origin of gaming
and educational technology. (Curveship,
a newer interactive narrative platform, is less friendly to
non-programmers than Inform 7 but offers some impressive possibilities.)

GameMaker(with a free lite version)
allows for building games on two levels: at the surface is an easy to
manipulate, graphical interface for building games. Beneath that, an
advanced scripting language allows for the possibility of delving
further. The
GameMaker’s Apprenticetextbook goes
step-by-step through making a variety of basic games drawn from arcade
genre standbys, many of which could serve as the basis for more creative
projects while also offering the tools to build procedural literacy and
digital skills.

GameSaladis a free tool for building simple
games. While GameSalad is only available for Macs, it offers a code-free
way to create graphical games for both mobile platforms and HTML5. It’s
relatively new, and most of the educational games created for it aim at
the younger crowd of kid-friendly mobile apps, but it definitely offers
the chance for experience with logic and rapid
prototyping.

For ideas on getting started, I recently spoke with
Lee Sheldon, author of the recently released The Multiplayer
Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game(Cengage
Learning 2011), whose book chronicles both his own
and others’ experiments with taking the structures, terminology, and
concepts of a massive multiplayer role-playing game and applying them to the
classroom. You can check out Lee Sheldon’s syllabus at his blog onGaming
the Classroom, along with more of his reflections
on the experiment, which divided his students into guilds and encouraged
them to “level up” through the semester. After using the course model in its
latest iteration, he reported perfect attendance. He also notes the value in
his system of “grading by attrition”—students are not being punished for
failing, but instead rewarded for progressing and thus less likely to be
defeated early.

As a professional game designer teaching courses on
game design, Lee Sheldon has a natural environment for innovation–but his
concepts open the door for a conversation across disciplines. Lee Sheldon
describes his model as “designing the class as a game”—so not just focusing
on extrinsic rewards (the typical focus of gamification), but instead trying
to promote “opportunities for collaboration” and “intrinsic rewards from
helping others.” As game designers, like teachers, are focused on creating
an experience, many of the strategies for building a class as game are
similar to more traditional preparation. And he advises that these ideas can
work for anyone: “You don’t have to a be a game designer…you can prep like
putting together a lesson plan, but learn the terminology.” Lee Sheldon
explains that one of the benefits of using games as a model is that a game
is abstracted—it has to “feel real”, but you get to “take out the stuff
that isn’t fun.” He also notes that “You can do just about anything in a
game that you can do in real life,” and the wealth of games today is a
testament to that range of possibilities.

Lee Sheldon and his team at RPI are now working on
an experiment with their new
Emergent Reality Labthat offers a possible future
for courses as games. He explained their current project, teaching Mandarin
Chinese as an alternate reality game, as a “Maltese Falcon-esque mystery”
narrative—the class will start out as usual, in a normal classroom, but it
will be interrupted and move into the lab as the students take a virtual
journey across China aided by motion-aware Kinect interfaces in an immersive
environment. Lee Sheldon said that his ideal outcome would be for students
to learn more Chinese than they would in a traditional class.

The iPad DecisionSome CPAs swear by the iPad, calling it an
indispensable business tool. Other CPAs believe Apple's tablet is about as
useful as a legless table. This article examines the iPad's strengths and
weaknesses, introduces the top apps and accessories, and gives guidelines for
deciding if the iPad is right for you and your business.
http://email.aicpa.org/cgi-bin15/DM/t/eit20bAne80GTt0Bpwt0Ea

Today Amazon unveiled a new tablet computer, the
company’s long-awaited competitor to Apple’s iPad. Though it won’t go on
sale until November, some gadget-happy college professors and administrators
are already speculating about the impact it will have on campuses.

The big surprise in today’s announcement was the
tablet’s price: $199. That’s far less than the lowest-cost iPad, which sells
for $499. Amazon named its new gadget the Kindle Fire, and it is smaller
than the iPad, measuring about 7 inches (compared with the iPad’s 10-inch
screen), so it more easily fits in one hand. It is powered by a processor on
par with the chip in Apple’s iPad 2, and it runs a modified version of
Google’s Android-tablet operating system. Amazon’s offering is missing some
features of the iPad, though. For instance, it has no camera (there are two
on the iPad 2) and no 3G antenna (which is an option on the iPad).

Previous iPad competitors have failed to win
substantial fan bases, but the Kindle Fire has one key advantage over
previous entrants. The new tablet seamlessly links to Amazon’s extensive
marketplace of books, software apps, movies, and television shows, letting
users access content (and spend money) with a simple tap of the finger.

Many education-technology officials have been
enthusiastic about tablet computers, hoping the lightweight devices might
work better in classroom settings than do laptops. Textbook publishers
have also cheered tablet computers,hoping they
will lift e-textbook sales.

Here are some reactions by education-technology
leaders posted today on Twitter and on blogs:

“Finally, college students have a cheaper iPad
alternative. Finally, at long last, something to appease the student
market.” —Zack Whittaker, ZD Net (reposted by Ray Schroeder, director of
the University of Illinois at Springfield’s Center for Online Learning,
Research, and Service,
on his Online Learning Update blog).

“Great price and form factor. Will it support
PDF’s and annotations is the question.” —Jeremy D. Franklin, a graduate
student at the University of Utah studying the sociology of higher
education,
on Twitter.

“Use of Fire for e-textbooks is an obvious
plus. Seems a little limited beyond that—a lot depends on what their
browser will do.” —Robert Talbert, a mathematician and educator
affiliated with the mathematics department at Grand Valley State
University, and
a Chronicle Network blogger,
on Twitter.

“Kindles are going to be more common on
campuses than cheap beer… I really think it has the potential to make
tablet computing a mainstream activity on college campuses.” —Shep
McAllister,
on the blog Hack College.

A fast-moving effort by the U.S. Education
Department to crack down on financial aid fraud faces a common dilemma in
higher education: how to protect the integrity of government aid coffers
without harming students.

Fraud rings that use “straw students” to pilfer
federal financial aid are a growing problem, particularly in online programs
at largely open-access community colleges and for-profit institutions. But
proposed regulatory fixes, even if well-meaning, could create layers of red
tape for colleges and make it harder for some students to receive financial
aid.

“It’s a balancing act,” said Evan Montague, dean of
students for Lansing Community College. Montague said the fraud rings are a
threat, but that his college has adequate safeguards in place, thanks to a
recent upgrade. He worries that the proposed federal policies would be an
added “regulatory burden.”

The department’s Office of the Inspector General
has seen a dramatic increase in online education scams, according to a
report released last month. The crimes typically feature a ringleader and
phony students who enroll, receive federal aid and split the proceeds with
the ringleader. Community colleges may be targeted more often than
for-profits because they typically charge less in tuition, leaving more of a
leftover aid balance for thieves to pocket.

Chicago State University officials have been
boasting about improvements in retention rates. But an investigation by
The Chicago Tribunefound that part of the
reason is that students with grade-point averages below 1.8 have been
permitted to stay on as students, in violation of university rules. Chicago
State officials say that they have now stopped the practice, which the
Tribune exposed by requesting the G.P.A.'s of a cohort of students. Some of
the students tracked had G.P.A.'s of 0.0.

A judge dismissed a
lawsuit on Monday that had accused the University of California at Los
Angeles of copyright infringement for streaming videos online. One
copyright expert thinks the UCLAdecisionincreases the chance that the HathiTrust
digital-library consortium will prevail in its effort to fight off a
separate copyright
lawsuitbrought by the Authors Guild over the
digitization of books from university libraries.

The lawsuit against
UCLA was filed by the Association for Information Media and Equipment (AIME)
and Ambrose Video Publishing Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the
Central District of California. Those plaintiffs
claimedthat UCLA had violated copyright and
breached its contract by copying DVD’s of Shakespeare plays acquired
from Ambrose and streaming them online for faculty and students to use
in courses.

But U.S. District Court
Judge Consuelo B. Marshall found multiple problems with their arguments.
Among the most important: He didn’t buy the plaintiffs’ claim that UCLA
had waived its constitutional “sovereign immunity,” a principle that
shields states—and state universities—from being sued without their
consent in federal court. The judge also held that the association,
which doesn’t own the copyrights at issue in the dispute, failed to
establish its standing to bring the case.

The decision means
“universities will have a little more breathing room for using media,”
says James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School.

But the more important
implication is that the case will be a precedent that universities can
cite in future copyright disputes, Mr. Grimmelmann says. The UCLA
decision will make the Authors Guild case against HathiTrust more of a
long shot, he speculates. That battle, which concerns a collection of
digital books that Google scanned from university libraries, also
involves an association suing on behalf of copyright owners, and the
target of the lawsuit is a digital repository hosted by a state
institution, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In addition to
Michigan, defendants in the HathiTrust case include Cornell University,
Indiana University, the University of California, and the University of
Wisconsin.

“That suit has almost
exactly the same sovereign-immunity and standing problems as this one,”
Mr. Grimmelmann says. “If the HathiTrust suit were to be decided
tomorrow by the same court, it would be dismissed.”

The Association of
Research Libraries hailed the UCLA victory as an especially welcome bit
of good news, given all the copyright struggles dogging universities.
But the group pointed out in a blog
postthat the decision ”stops short of
vindicating the strongest fair-use arguments in favor of streaming.”
Kevin Smith, Duke University’s scholarly-communications officer, also
noted in his own
postthat, because much of the dismissal hung
on the sovereign-immunity question, “a major part of the decision
applies only to state entities” and “does not translate to private
universities.”

The U.S. Copyright Office on Monday promulgated a
number of
new exemptionsto the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, including one allowing university staffers and students to hack DVD
content and display it for educational purposes. If a university or student
lawfully obtains copy of a DVD, the agency says, they can bypass the
encryption so long as "circumvention is accomplished solely in order to
accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new
works for... Educational uses by college and university professors and by
college and university film and media studies students." The exemption
applies when professors or students want to use excerpts of the hacked DVD
in documentary films or "non-commercial videos." Tracy Mitrano, director of
I.T. policy at Cornell University and a technology law blogger for Inside
Higher Ed, called the decision "very big news," and "good news," for
higher education, noting that advocates in academe have been
lobbying for an expansion of fair use exemptions for
some time. One campus that might take heart is the University of California
at Los Angeles, which an educational media group
threatened to suelast spring for copying and
streaming DVD content on course websites. The university had
refused to stopthe practice, and a UCLA spokesman
said the group, the Association for Information and Media Equipment, has not
followed through. He said UCLA is reviewing the new rules.

To understand TIAA-CREF's offerings, first
understand what it is: Whatever the prominence of the words Teachers and
College in its unpacked acronym, TIAA-CREF is simply a giant insurance
company. Pennywise wrote about TIAA-CREF once before, in a column that
appeared at the height of the financial crisis entitled, "Is TIAA-CREF
Safe?" Personally, I find that article has held up fairly well and may be
reassuring today, in our renewed mood of uncertainty. New readers might want
to take a look at it.

TIAA-CREF has weathered the Great Recession well.
Today the company ranks 87th on the Fortune 500 list, with $32-billion in
revenues and $1.4-billion in annual profits. All four ratings agencies still
give the company the highest possible rating for financial stability; at
this point, its ratings are better than the federal government's. A leading
investing Web site calls the company the strongest annuity insurer in the
United States.

As for your specific TIAA-CREF investing options,
your university's human-resources department can choose from a smorgasbord,
so plans will differ. Almost certainly your college's plan has annuities at
its core. Those are, for the most part, variable annuities, meaning their
value and rates of return fluctuate along with financial markets,
functioning much like mutual funds in the accumulation phase—the stretch of
life in which you amass your holdings. Once you reach the drawdown phase,
however, those vehicles offer the ability either to take out your pile of
money in a lump sum or to annuitize it, meaning convert it into a steady
stream of annual (hence the name "annuity") income that will last the rest
of your life.

You may notice annuities getting bad press from
time to time because the ones sold by many insurers come wrapped in a lot of
hidden fees and are sold by advisers seeking commissions. TIAA-CREF's
annuities are in a different category; they are relatively low-cost, the
company's consultants get no commissions, and the criticisms don't really
apply (one exception noted at the end of this column).

Here's how not to invest with TIAA-CREF:
Don't—after looking at the 10-year returns of the different options—put your
money heavily into the ones that have performed best. Ten years from now
something else may have outperformed them. The funds that have done well
recently are probably the most expensive right now, but nobody can be sure.

Instead, consider your household portfolio as a
whole. Seek a well-diversified mix of different types of investments that
rely on returns from different sectors of the economy. Understand how each
option functions and spread your money around in proportions that make sense
for your relative sense of risk.

Your plan is likely to include the following:

TIAA Traditional Annuity. From
your point of view, this account works a bit like a bank certificate of
deposit with a very generous interest rate. TIAA-CREF guarantees that any
money you put in will be returned. The company then pays a specific rate of
interest (currently 3.75 percent) on all new money deposited, a rate
adjusted periodically. (The overall rate of return for the past 10 years was
5.62 percent). Because TIAA-CREF manages the underlying pool of money by
investing mostly in bonds and related securities, rates in the coming years
will probably be fairly low, but your contributions are contractually
guaranteed.

This is an excellent investment for those who react
very badly to market drops. However, while you do not face market risk, you
do face individual company risk. If TIAA-CREF went bankrupt, its guarantee
would mean nothing. That's why the firm's profitability and stability are
crucial.

Note: To guarantee your principal plus a rate of
interest, TIAA-CREF puts some fairly strong restrictions on clients' ability
to transfer money in and out of this annuity. Don't commit money to TIAA
Traditional unless you are content to let it sit until you retire. You can
get it out, but it will be difficult.

Tip: Concentrate your TIAA Traditional holdings in
your main 403(b) account, since a much lower rate of interest (currently
0.75 percent less) will be paid on it in your Supplemental Retirement
Account (SRA), if you have one.

TIAA Real Estate Variable Annuity.
The funds in this distinctive offering are invested directly in real estate
(office buildings, malls, industrial parks, and so forth). Buy in, and you
get the perks of being a property mogul and landlord, without all the
hassles.

CREF Variable Annuities. These
function a great deal like regular mutual funds. There are five stock-market
options: Global, Stock, Equity Index, Growth, and Social Choice. Global and
Stock both invest in world stock markets, including U.S. and international
ones. Equity Index and Growth are solely U.S. stock-market funds. Social
Choice screens for certain ethical and political criteria. Then there are
three options that apply to the more stable, less risky part of your
portfolio: Bond, Inflation-Linked Bond, and Money Market.

It may be that your university plan also offers,
beyond the above annuities, TIAA-CREF's vast array of mutual funds, which
come in almost infinite variations, including LifeCycle funds (all-in-one,
no-brainer options for those who want to put things on autopilot) or highly
specific funds focusing on specific sectors of the stock market, such as
small-cap companies.

The precise mix that is right for you depends on
your risk tolerance and time frame. There are decent models on Page 12 of
this brochure. No need to
make it complex, though. A pretty good holding could be amassed in just TIAA
Traditional (20 percent); TIAA Real Estate (10 percent); one of the
stock-market annuities, perhaps Equity Index since it costs you the least,
or Global since it has international diversification to offer (60 percent);
and the inflation-adjusted bond option (10 percent). Reduce the equities
portion and increase the bond if you are skittish or near retirement.

Remember that the current market mayhem may mean
you will be buying low. Don't let it scare you away from stocks, even if, in
the short term, you see some declines.

The movement to make research freely available got
a high-profile boost this week with the news that Princeton University’s
faculty has
unanimously adoptedan open-access policy. “The
principle of open access is consistent with the fundamental purposes of
scholarship,” said the faculty advisory committee that proposed the
resolution.

The decision puts the university in line with
Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a growing
number of other institutions with policies that encourage or require
researchers to post open copies of their articles, usually in an
institutional repository. Unpublished drafts, books, lecture notes, etc.,
are not included in the Princeton policy, which gives the university a
“nonexclusive right” to make copies of its faculty’s scholarly journal
articles publicly available.

“Both the library and members of the faculty,
principally in the sciences, have been thinking for some time that we would
like to take a concrete step toward making the publications of our
extraordinary faculty freely available to a much larger audience and not
restricted to those who can afford to pay journal subscription fees,” said
Karin Trainer, Princeton’s university librarian. She said they had
encountered “no resistance at all” to the idea among faculty members.

The new mandate permits professors to post copies
of articles online in “not-for-a-fee venues,” including personal and
university Web sites. The faculty advisory committee that recommended the
policy said that it will keep faculty members “from giving away all
their rights when they publish in a journal.”

Rankings of Universities in Latin and South AmericaYou end up with a system where hundreds of
thousands of people have degrees that are totally worthless.
"The struggle to make the grade: If only more of the region’s
higher-education institutions were like the University of São Paulo," The
Economist, October 8-14, 2011 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21531468

LATIN AMERICA boasts some giant universities and a
few venerable ones: the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) enroll several hundred thousand
students apiece, while Lima’s San Marcos was founded in 1551. Even so, the
region is hardly synonymous with excellence in higher education. Research
output is unimpressive, teaching techniques are old-fashioned and students
drop out in droves. These failings matter. Faster economic growth is driving
a big rise in demand for higher education in the region and a large crop of
new universities. Now, at last, comes an effort to assess the quality of
Latin American higher education.

On October 4th Quacquarelli Symonds, an education
consultancy, published the first regional ranking of Latin American
universities, combining measures of reputation, research output, academics’
qualifications and staff-student ratios. Of the 200 top universities, 65 are
in Brazil, 35 in Mexico, 25 apiece in Argentina and Chile and 20 in Colombia
(see table for the top ten). The University of São Paulo (USP), the richest
and biggest university in Brazil’s richest state, came top.

This week USP won another plaudit, becoming the
only Latin American university to make it into the world’s top 200
universities in another much-watched list, published by Times Higher
Education, a British specialist weekly. USP ranked 178th this year (up from
232nd last year). Founded and supported by the government of São Paulo
state, USP’s climb up the rankings has been helped by a big increase in
private funding and in international collaborations and recognition. It also
led the Latin American contingent in another list, this time compiled by
Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University and released in August, ranking in the
cluster between 101st and 150th. This list focuses on scientific research;
USP is becoming a world leader in tropical medicine, parasitology and
biofuels.

Nowhere else in Latin America can match USP. The
other leaders in the region are a mix of old-established public universities
(the University of Chile, for example), Catholic institutions or secular
non-profit places such as Bogotá’s University of the Andes and Monterrey’s
Tecnológico.

University rankings miss hard-to-measure factors
such as the quality of teaching and the campus atmosphere. They are biased
towards bigger universities, which tend to be better known and to produce
more research. (This may have helped Argentina’s UBA, whose glory days are
in the past.) But what they do capture matters. In their different ways they
try to identify beacons of excellence and innovation. When they agree, as
with USP’s regional pre-eminence, it is worth taking note.

These regional rankings might also break down the
insularity that has long been a mark of Latin American academia. “Across the
region, good students are recruited to faculty at their own universities,
rather than encouraged to leave and broaden their horizons,” says Jamil
Salmi, a higher-education specialist at the World Bank. “And there’s a
hostility to the very notion you might hire faculty from abroad.”

At many Latin American public universities students
pay nothing, staff are unsackable, and the curriculum is old-fashioned and
politicised. Good teaching and research are not rewarded with extra funding
or promotions; institutions do not lose money if their students drop out.
Except in Brazil many faculty members are part-timers without PhDs.

In the past three decades, governments have
accepted a huge expansion of private provision, much of it by for-profit
outfits. That has allowed them to expand higher education quickly without
spending more, but before they decided what made a good university, says
Francisco Marmolejo, a Mexican consultant on university administration. The
result is that mechanisms to ensure quality are weak or nonexistent. Poor
youngsters who attend the mainly awful state schools usually end up in these
places, paying through the nose.

No country in the region has worked out
satisfactorily how to share the cost of degrees between students and
taxpayers. Chile’s government is currently suffering the consequences.
Months of student protests against the exorbitant cost of for-profit
universities have seen the popularity of the president, Sebastián Piñera,
plunge. The country’s education system, from primary school to university,
is probably the region’s best. But Chile also has one of world’s lowest
levels of public funding for higher education, some of the longest degrees
and no comprehensive system of student grants or subsidised loans. When a
flat jobs market was added to this mix, it became combustible.

In Venezuela Hugo Chávez’s government has expanded
higher education by forcing existing universities to accept a massive
increase in student numbers, and by setting-up a giant new open-access state
institution, the “Bolivarian University”. This is supposed eventually to
have around 200 campuses. The result, says Mr Marmolejo, is a “time-bomb”.
“Unprepared institutions; non-existent infrastructure; 300 students in
classrooms that used to hold 15. You end up
with a system where hundreds of thousands of people have degrees that are
totally worthless.”

Recently, headline news out of Europe has led
investors on a vertigo-inducing roller-coaster ride. Markets have swung
wildly on the latest rumors and fears. Skepticism regarding Greece's ability
to pay back its debt seems to have hardened. However, lost in all the tumult
is one of the euro zone's newly reformed members. Ireland's example could
offer other indebted countries some inspiration for solving their own
crises.

Ireland was brought down by its wayward,
over-leveraged banking system, which fueled a private-sector credit boom and
a real-estate bubble. But this financial froth belied strong economic
fundamentals and two key competitive
advantages: a skilled labor force and a business-friendly regulatory and tax
environment.

Moreover, fiscal policy was prudent leading into
the crisis. In 2007 Ireland's public debt was only 25% of its gross domestic
product and its budget was balanced, albeit thanks, in part, to strong tax
revenues from a credit-fueled economic boom.

The financial crisis and ensuing global downturn
dealt a heavy blow. But Irish citizens and politicians rolled up their
sleeves and quickly worked to repair and rebuild. The early results are
promising.

Unable to rely on an exchange-rate adjustment,
Ireland has engineered a more than 20% drop in unit labor costs in
manufacturing since 2008—which boosts its competitiveness equivalent to a
20% currency depreciation. Broad-based wage cuts have been painful, but they
are working: Since January 2008 Ireland's trade surplus has doubled, and now
runs at more than 20% of GDP.

This robust export performance has more than offset
the ongoing adjustment in the domestic economy. As a result, Ireland was
Europe's second fastest growing economy in the second quarter of this year,
expanding at an annual rate of 2.3%. The recovery in GDP growth in turn
helped Ireland to meet and exceed the deficit-reduction targets set by the
European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Last year Ireland was also the first member of the
euro zone's so-called periphery to return to an external current-account
surplus, though it dipped back to a deficit this year. The IMF now expects
it to return to a surplus of 2.3% of GDP by the end of next year. This is in
sharp contrast to Greece and Portugal, which both have current-account
deficits still hovering around 10% of GDP.

Meanwhile, the government has resisted pressure
from its EU partners to raise its 12.5% corporate-tax rate. Dublin's
regulatory touch also remains light. This business climate, along with a
productive and educated work force, has served as a magnet for foreign
direct investment. It rose 19% in the first half of this year, led by
technology and services companies.

Ireland's policies have also pulled its banks back
from the brink. The country has recapitalized its banking system, which
continues to deleverage aggressively. The country's banking stress-tests
have been among the most demanding and credible in Europe. They are the only
ones to have relied on an independent external agency instead of just
government regulators.

Beyond the country's strong economic fundamentals,
broad social and political consensus sets Ireland apart. Austerity is bitter
medicine to swallow, but Ireland's citizens understand there was no easy way
out of their predicament, and that their short-term sacrifices are laying
the groundwork for sustainable growth in the future. Thanks to this general
social consensus—in contrast to the rioting and protests seen further south
in Europe—and despite a change in government, Ireland's reforms remain fully
on track.

While policy makers in the euro zone take the
difficult steps to ensure the single currency's survival, markets will
remain volatile and be tempted to paint all embattled European countries
with the same brush. But that would only repeat an old mistake.

During the first 10 years of the euro's existence,
markets ignored the fact that some member countries were accumulating
unsustainable imbalances—only to be caught off-guard when sovereign spreads
suddenly widened.

The vast majority of senior executives globally say
their organizations have already moved at least some business activities to
the Cloud and expect 2012 investment to skyrocket, with some companies
planning to spend more than a fifth of their IT budget on Cloud next year,
according to a report by KPMG International.

“Clearly, these findings proclaim, ‘the Cloud is
now,’” said Bryan Cruickshank, KPMG head of Global IT Advisory, Management
Consulting. “Clearly Cloud is transcending IT and widely impacting business
operations, as a full third of survey respondents said it would
fundamentally change their business, which is significant considering many
organizations are still developing their Cloud strategies.”

In a KPMG global survey of organizations that will
use the Cloud, as well as companies that will provide Cloud services,
economic factors were cited by 76 percent of both groups as an important
driver for Cloud adoption. However, a number of other considerations were
equally or more important: 80 percent said the switch to Cloud was driven by
efforts to improve processes, offering more agility across the enterprise;
79 percent of users and 76 percent of providers said they saw it as having
technical benefits, in some cases improvements that they otherwise could not
gain from their own data centers; and, 76 percent said the use of Cloud
would have strategic benefits, possibly including transforming their
business models to gain a competitive advantage.

Most user respondents to the KPMG survey (81
percent) said they were either evaluating Cloud, planned a Cloud
implementation, or had already adopted a Cloud strategy and timeline for
their organization, with almost one-quarter of them saying their
organization already runs all core IT services on the Cloud (10 percent) or
is in transition to do so (13 percent). Fewer than one in 10 executives say
their company has no immediate plans to enter the Cloud environment.

“Cloud adoption is quickly shifting from a
competitive advantage to an operational necessity, enabling innovation that
can create new business models and opportunities,” said Steve Hasty, head of
Global IT Advisory, Risk Consulting. “As this rapid adoption curve continues
to gain momentum amid a struggling global economy, it is important for
corporate leadership, directors and boards to be informed and engaged in
strategic discussions about Cloud’s impact on their long-term growth
opportunities and competitiveness.”

Hasty pointed out that the role of the corporate
Cloud leader remained contentious. IT executives see migration to the Cloud
as their initiative, while operations executives believe the CEO should lead
the change. “Enter the Chief Integration Officer, as the traditional CIO’s
role expands to break down potential silos and integrate internal and
external business needs, systems and partners,” said Hasty.

KPMG previewed the survey findings this week during
Oracle Open World, Oracle Corp.’s global conference in San Francisco.

IT-Business Executives Differ Moderately on
Cloud Expectations

Executives whose companies would use a Cloud
strategy agree that spending will rise significantly in 2012.

According to the KPMG survey, 17 percent of
corporate executives said Cloud spending would exceed 20 percent of the
total IT budget in 2012.

ISACA has a White Paper on its website with the above title. The paper is an
excellent resource for those interested in cloud risks and how to address
them. That includes a lot of people!

One of the interesting parts of the paper is the table listing the various
types of vulnerabilities encountered in the cloud. These include SQL
Injection, Cross-site scripting and Insecure Direct Object Reference, among
others. The paper goes on to list some areas of security to focus on,
including some specific guidance on the old stand-by's of executive support,
training and support.

The paper concludes with assurance considerations, including the use of
Cobit to strengthen controls.

Has anyone used Google docs to
create self-tests? I have been creating self-tests in Flash, but I just
discovered that I can create a “form” in Google docs that results in a
self-test. I can edit the form after I have created it, but if I delete a
question it still stays in the Excel doc that records the student answers.
I’m not sure what I am doing wrong.

I am trying to get undergrads to
engage in class, and I thought the Google self-tests might be one way. One
thing I know for sure is that the way I am using Powerpoint doesn’t work.
For example, I developed slides to illustrate a problem step by step. Then
I ask a similar question, and it’s like I’m speaking a different language.
My students just tune out when the slides start going.

If the Google self-test works
like I think it could, I could post a link to a self-test in a web page or
slide, have the students work the question in class and submit the answer,
and then bring up the answers in the Excel sheet to see in real time if
students are understanding the concept. I think clickers would do the same
thing, but I should have adopted those at the beginning of the semester.

I’m open to any other suggestions
you might have.

Amy

September 27, 2011 reply from Rick Lillie

Hi Amy,

Have you considered using VoiceThread as an
alternative to the PowerPoint slides? You can still use PowerPoint slides or
your own slides and mark them up as you talk about each slide. Rather than
audio narration, you can use video narration that displays in a separate
side window to the presentation screen.

This approach works much the same way as if you
projected an image onto a whiteboard in the classroom and then talked to
students while marking up the image. I use this technique in fully online
classes. Students really like this approach. It might get you a better
result than what you describe in your AECM post.

I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets to create an
online scantron type answer sheet for quizzes. The underlying spreadsheet
format is set up in the spreadsheet. The form is tied to the spreadsheet.
You can select a theme to make the form look more appealing to students.

You should be able to modify the spreadsheet and
then resave or recreate the form. Changes should then be reflected in the
online form.

I hope this helps.

Rick Lillie
CalState San Bernardino

September 27, 2011 reply from Ruth Bender

Hi Amy

I don’t use it myself, but
you might like to read this page and the comments below it. @russeltarr has
tweeted about it a few times.

Is it really possible for time to turn backwards?
Although my personal view is that Professor Kaku is five parts scientist and
five parts publicity-seeking gadfly, this article by him makes skeptical sense
to me.

Cracking the light barrier violated the core of
Einstein's theory. According to relativity, as you approach the speed of
light, time slows down, you get heavier, and you also get flatter (all of
which have been measured in the lab). But if you go faster than light, then
the impossible happens. Time goes backward. You are lighter than nothing,
and you have negative width. Since this is ridiculous, you cannot go faster
than light, said Einstein.

The CERN announcement was electrifying. Some
physicists burst out with glee, because it meant that the door was opening
to new physics (and more Nobel Prizes). New, daring theories would need to
be proposed to explain this result. Others broke out in a cold sweat,
realizing that the entire foundation of modern physics might have to be
revised. Every textbook would have to be rewritten, every experiment
recalibrated.

Cosmology, the very way we think of space, would be
forever altered. The distance to the stars and galaxies and the age of the
universe (13.7 billion years) would be thrown in doubt. Even the expanding
universe theory, the Big Bang theory, and black holes would have to be
re-examined.

Moreover, everything we think we understand about
nuclear physics would need to be reassessed. Every school kid knows
Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, where a small amount of mass M
can create a vast amount of energy E, because the speed of light C squared
is such a huge number. But if C is off, it means that all nuclear physics
has to be recalibrated. Nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and radioactive
dating would be affected because all nuclear reactions are based on
Einstein's relation between matter and energy.

If all this wasn't bad enough, it would also mean
that the fundamental principles of physics are incorrect. Modern physics is
based on two theories, relativity and the quantum theory, so half of modern
physics would have to be replaced by a new theory. My own field, string
theory, is no exception. Personally, I would have to revise all my theories
because relativity is built into string theory from the very beginning.

How will this astonishing result play out? As Carl
Sagan once said, remarkable claims require remarkable proof. Laboratories
around the world, like Fermilab outside Chicago, will redo the CERN
experiments and try to falsify or verify their results.

My gut reaction, however, is that this is a false
alarm. Over the decades, there have been numerous challenges to relativity,
all of them proven wrong. In the 1960s, for example, physicists were
measuring the tiny effect of gravity upon a light beam. In one study,
physicists found that the speed of light seemed to oscillate with the time
of day. Amazingly, the speed of light rose during the day, and fell at
night. Later, it was found that, since the apparatus was outdoors, the
sensors were affected by the temperature of daylight.

Reputations may rise and fall. But in the end, this
is a victory for science. No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless
when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any
place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by
experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In
science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for
everything.

Mr. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New
York, is the author of "Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human
Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100" (Doubleday, 2011).

Jensen Comment
One thing is absolutely certain. The answers will not be found in the CRSP,
Compustat, or AuditAnalytic databases.

Yesterday we learned that
15.1% of Americans were living in povertyin 2010,
the highest level since 1993, and up nearly 1 percentage point from 2009,
when it was 14.3%. That data is based on an income measurement which shows
that in 2010, 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line,
defined as $22,314 a year for a family of four.

But income is just one way to measure poverty, and
a particularly tricky (and narrow) way at that – so says Notre Dame
economist and National Poverty Center research affiliate, James Sullivan,
who believes that to measure poverty strictly by
income fails to accurately reflect people’s true economic circumstances.
Income alone ignores the effects of things like the Earned Income Tax
Credit, Medicaid, food stamps, and housing subsidies. From a
Notre Dame press releaseon Sullivan’s recent
poverty research:

“Income received from food stamps, for example,
grew by more than $14 billion in 2009. By excluding these benefits in
measuring poverty, the Census figures fail to recognize that the food
stamps program lifts many people out of actual poverty,” Sullivan says.
“If these programs are cut back in the future, actual poverty will rise
even more.”

Using income-based numbers only also overlooks the struggles of many
Americans who are tightening their belts – those who are worried about
losing their jobs or facing foreclosure, or those who devote a large
chunk of their paychecks to paying off medical bills. The standard of
living for these people is lower than their income would suggest.

In a recent paper, Sullivan and co-author
Bruce D. Meyerof the University of
Chicago, argue that consumption offers a more robust measurement of poverty
than income. Their key point is that poverty, when measured correctly, has
declined over time, which is contrary to official measurements. Here’s the
full version of their paper. From the abstract:

This paper examines changes in the extent of
material deprivation in the United States from the early 1960s to 2009.
We investigate how both income and consumption based poverty have
changed over time and explore how these trends differ across family
types. Estimates of changes in poverty over the past five decades are
very sensitive to how resources are measured. A poverty measure that
incorporates taxes falls noticeably more than a pre-tax income measure.
Sharp differences are also evident between the patterns for income and
consumption based poverty. Income poverty falls more sharply than
consumption poverty during the 1960s. The reverse is true for the 2000s,
although in 2009 consumption poverty rises more than income poverty…
Income based poverty gaps have been rising over the last two decades
while consumption based gaps have fallen. We show that how poverty is
measured affects the composition of the poor, and that the consumption
poor appear to be worse off than the income poor.

Some quick highlights:

Income and consumption measures of the poverty
gap have generally moved in opposite directions in the last two decades,
with income based poverty gaps rising, but consumption based poverty
gaps falling.

Sullivan and Meyer show that upward bias in
the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) has a large effect on changes in
poverty over long periods of time. For example, between the early 1960s
and 2009, an income poverty measure that corrects for this bias declines
by 13.5 percentage points more than a comparable measure based on the
CPI-U.

Compared to the income poor, the consumption
poor are less educated, less likely to own a home, more likely to live
in married parent families, and much less likely to be single
individuals or elderly. The fraction of the consumption poor living in
married parent families is 80% higher than the fraction of the income
poor living in such families in recent years.

Here are three graphs from their paper
demonstrating the differences between income-based measurements of poverty,
and consumption based measurements over time:

The practice at elite M.B.A. programs of not
reporting student grades is popular but may not be achieving its stated
goals, according toa new studyby the National Bureau of Economic Research. The
theory, believed by many students, is that the policy of keeping grades
secret encourages students to take risks in their educations, and to take
challenging courses. But at several of the business schools with the policy,
reports suggest high levels of apathy and little evidence of the
intellectual risk-taking proponents cite, the study found.

Jensen Comment
I guess the transcripts with grades will only be sent to students and former
students who must then decide to whom transcripts with grades will be disclosed.

I never quite understood how this works in practice. Employers typically
demand transcripts with grades. Doctoral programs typically require transcripts
when evaluating applicants. How can a candidate's refusal to report grades be
viewed as anything other than negative when applying for a job or further
graduate study?

Of course this is a bit of an exercise in futility in MBA programs where
virtually all graduates get only A and B grades. Some programs allow C grades if
each C grade is offset by an A grade in another course. In any case grade
disclosure is somewhat an exercise in futility if a B-average is required for
graduation.

Much more important from the standpoint of top students, employers, and
prospective doctoral programs would be a student's graduating rank in the class
much like military academies rand graduates. General MacArthur was a high
ranking graduate of West Point whereas General Eisenhower had a lackluster
ranking.

The current "buzzword" among leaders is "transparency." Hardly a day goes
by that a group leader (politician, manager, or administrator) doesn’t state
that he values transparency and will provide full disclosure of his
information and actions. This project tests experimentally whether or not
leaders, when given a choice, actually reveal a preference for transparency.
Our experiment is based on a theoretical model by Komai, Stegeman, and
Hermalin (2007). Fifteen subjects are randomly assigned to five groups of
three. Each group separately participates in an investment game with three
possible return scenarios (high, average, and low) that are equally likely
to happen. Investing in the low-return scenario is not profitable to either
individual group members or the whole group. In the average-return scenario,
group well-being is maximized if all the group members invest in the
project, but full cooperation may not be achieved simply because the
dominant strategy of the individuals is to free ride on others. In the
high-return scenario full cooperation is also optimal for the group, but
subjects may or may not coordinate on full cooperation because they may fail
to coordinate their efforts with the others. We consider a leader-follower
setting. Only one member of the group (the leader) observes the scenario.
The leader moves before the rest of the group members and first decides
whether or not to invest in the project. The leader then chooses between two
information regimes: revealing his decision and the return scenario to the
rest of the group or revealing his decision but not the return scenario.
Absent any information provided by their leader, followers know only the
possible return scenarios and their likelihoods. They do not know which
scenario is assigned to their group. Given the leaders’ information choices
and investment decisions, the relevant information will be conveyed to the
followers. The followers then will separately and simultaneously decide
whether or not to invest in the project (followers do not know anything
about the different information regimes). This is realistic in many
real-world circumstances because in many business or political environments
the leaders have exclusive access to critical information and are in charge
of deciding whether or not to reveal the details of their information and
actions to their potential followers; in many circumstances it is
practically difficult for the followers to verify the real information or
the leaders’ actions.

Jensen Comment
When I made this assertion over a year ago, Jagdish Gangolly objected on the
premise that Social Security was just a pay-as-you go program that was not a
Ponzi fraud.. This begs the question about when a pay-as-you go system becomes a
Ponzi fraud. I think it becomes a Ponzi fraud when the probability of sustaining
future obligations with price-level-adjusted (PLA) payments becomes highly
improbable.

Social Security Trust Funds filled with worker and employer contributions
have played out without any hope that trust fund buildup with premiums can meet
current or future entitlements obligations. A huge part of the problem is that
Congress added billions of entitlements to persons at any age that are declared
disabled who never paid anywhere near enough premiums to cover their future
takeouts. Another huge part of the problem is that Congress wiped out these
trust funds with IOUs so the trust fund cash could be spent on current programs
and wars rather than being invested for the future like most trust funds in the
private sector.

Be that as it may, is Social Security a Ponzi fraud as argued by Catanach,
Ketz, Rick Perry, and many others?
My argument is that Social Security will always meet pension and disability
entitlements contracted obligations, at least nominally, as long as the United
States itself does not totally implode due to more serious entitlements
obligations like Medicare and Medaid, The reason is that Ben Bernanke, Paul
Krugman, the Weimar Republic, and Robert Mugabe have shown us how to meet
government's contractual obligations simply by printing its legal tender without
borrowing or taxing.

Of course in 2060 a $1,000,000 USD may not buy a single chicken egg --- as is
the case for a million Zimbabwe dollars today.

Thus, whether Social Security is a Ponzi scheme really depends
upon whether we're talking meeting entitlements obligations with nominal dollars
or dollars indexed for changes in purchasing power. If were talking meeting
entitlements with PLA dollars, Social Security is a hopeless Ponzi fraud,
because there's virtually no hope of meeting obligations in 2060 with PLA
dollars.

Also how does playing more hands of poker differ from portfolio theory?

Hint
The answer lies in risk diversification in portfolio that is not present in
playing more hands of poker, especially when the stakes are limited in poker.

If the stakes are unlimited, poker players with lots of time on their hands
and unlimited funds never lose any money at poker.
Why is that?

Hint
This is known in statistics as the St. Petersburg Paradox ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
Which is why casinos always limit the bets.
Of course every poker player has limited time and funds except maybe Ben
Bernanke and his successors controlling the printing presses.

Almost half of undergraduate programs at public
colleges and universities in Texas are in danger of being eliminated because
they do not meet a new state requirement of graduating at least 25 students
every five years,
UPI reported. Many physics programs nationally do
not graduate large numbers of undergraduates, but are considered vital
nonetheless because of the role of the discipline in preparing students for
a variety of science and engineering related fields, and because of the
significance of research in physics. A delegation from the American Physical
Society recently met with officials of the Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board to discuss concerns about enforcing the rule with regard
to physics. Raymund Paredes, the Texas commissioner of higher education,
said he would not back exceptions to the rule. "In this budgetary
environment, we can't afford the luxury of programs not producing
graduates," he told UPI. "It's up to academic departments faced with closure
of programs to salvage them."

Jensen Comment
Although physics courses may be vital to an undergraduate curriculum in science,
it would seem like having physics majors is not so "vital" in a large state
university that graduates less than five undergraduate majors per year on
average. Some more "useless degrees" than physics have more majors per year. The
problem in most of those instances is that the numbers of graduates in
disciplines like journalism, advertising, agriculture, music, psychology,
horticulture, and animal science greatly exceeds the demand even for PhD
graduates in those disciplines.

As college
seniors prepare to graduate, The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to
determine which majors—from journalism to psychology —didn’t pay.

Some
citiesare better than others for college
graduates. Some college courses are
definitely hotterthan others. Even some
iPhone apps are
betterfor college
students than others. But when it comes down to it, there’s only one
question that rings out in dormitories, fraternities, and dining
halls across the nation: What’s your major?

Eleven Rules of Life
(from the book "Dumbing Down our Kids")
by Charles J. Sykes, 1995
Thank you Dan Gheorghe Somnea for the heads up.

Rule 1:
Life is not fair - get used to it

Rule 2:
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to
accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself

Rule 3:
You will NOT make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a
vice-president with a car phone until you earn both

Rule 4:
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss

Rule 5:
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different
word for burger flipping - they called it opportunity

Rule 6:
If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your
mistakes, learn from them

Rule 7:
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got
that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk
about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of
your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room

Rule 8:
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In
some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many
times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest
resemblance to ANYTHING in real life

Rule 9:
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few
employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time!

Rule 10:
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the
coffee shop and go to jobs

Visualize.me is based in Toronto, and they believe
the traditional text resume is "boring, lengthy, and long overdue for a
makeover." With that in mind, they have created the Visualize.me
application. Visitors can sign up here to create an interactive and
graphically exciting version of their resume that is quite novel. First-time
visitors should watch the introductory video on the site, and then look over
a few of the sample resumes. The tool is quite a find, and this version of
the application is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer
and Mac OS X 10.3 and newer.

Twinbow is a web application designed to help
social media user to engage their network of friends more effectively. The
application's basic function allows users to associate certain feeds (like
Twitter or RSS) with certain colors. This way, users can search for items of
interest more easily. One of the other nice features is that its dashboard
format allows users view pictures in-client and they can also read news and
other articles without leaving the application. This version is compatible
with all operating systems, including Linux.

Have you thought about creating your own website? Perhaps you feel that
it might take too much time or be too complicated? Never fear, as Magnt is
here. After signing up for a free account, Magnt will walk you through the
creation of a personal website by using a number of existing templates and
customized graphics. Also, users can bring together all of their social
networks on their site, which makes communication with friends and potential
business partners convenient. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.

The Puush application allows users to take
advantage of keyboard shortcuts or drag-drop gestures to quickly capture any
portion of their screen or upload any file. The files are effectively "puush'd",
which leaves a short URL in the clipboard, which means they can be easily
shared with others. Visitors can also archive and embed their files for
free, which is quite nice. This version is compatible with computers running
Windows XP and newer and Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6

Take your bananas apart when you get home from the store. If you leave them
connected at the stem, they ripen faster.

Store your opened chunks of cheese in aluminum foil. It will stay fresh much
longer and not mold!

Peppers with 3 (males) bumps on the bottom are sweeter and better for eating.
Peppers with 4 (females) bumps on the bottom are firmer and better for cooking.

Add a teaspoon of water when frying ground beef. It will help pull the grease
away from the meat while cooking.

To really make scrambled eggs or omelets rich add a couple of Spoonfuls of
sour cream, cream cheese, or heavy cream; then beat them.

Add garlic immediately to a recipe if you want a light taste Of garlic and at
the end of the recipe if your want a stronger taste of garlic.

Reheat Pizza Heat leftover pizza in a nonstick skillet on top of the stove;
set heat to med-low And heat till warm. This keeps the crust crispy. No soggy
micro pizza. I saw this on the food channel and it really works.

Reheating refrigerated bread To warm biscuits, pancakes, or muffins that were
refrigerated, place them in A microwave next to a cup of water. The increased
moisture will keep the food Moist and help it reheat faster.

Newspaper weeds away Start putting torn newspaper in your plants, work the
nutrients in your soil. Wet newspapers, Put layers around the plants,
overlapping as you go; cover with mulch and forget about weeds. Weeds will get
through some gardening plastic; they will not get through wet newspapers.

Broken Glass Use a wet cotton ball or Q-tip to pick up the small shards of
glass you can't see easily.

Flexible vacuum To get something out of a heat register or under the fridge
add an empty paper towel roll or empty gift wrap roll to your vacuum. It can be
bent or flattened to get in narrow openings.

Reducing Static Cling Pin a small safety pin to the seam of your slip and you
will not have a clingy skirt or dress. Same thing works with slacks that cling
when wearing panty hose. Place pin in seam of slacks and ... Ta DA! ... Static
is gone.

Measuring Cups Before you pour sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill
with hot water. Dump out the hot water, but don't dry cup. Next, add your
ingredient (peanut butter, honey, etc.) and watch how easily it comes right out.

Foggy Windshield? Hate foggy windshields? Buy a chalkboard eraser and keep it
in the glove box of your car When the windows fog, rub with the eraser! Works
better than a cloth!

Reopening envelope If you seal an envelope and then realize you forgot to
include something inside, Just place your sealed envelope in the freezer for an
hour or two. Viola! It unseals easily.

Conditioner Use your hair conditioner to shave your legs. It's cheaper than
shaving cream and leaves your legs really smooth. It's also a great way to use
up the conditioner you bought but didn't like when you tried it in your hair.

Goodbye Fruit Flies To get rid of pesky fruit flies, take a small glass, fill
it 1/2 with Apple Cider Vinegar And 2 drops of dish washing liquid; mix well.
You will find those flies drawn to the cup and gone forever!

Get Rid of Ants Put small piles of cornmeal where you see ants. They eat it,
take it 'home,' can't digest it so it kills them. It may take a week or so,
especially if it rains, but it works and you don't have the worry about pets or
small children being harmed!

INFO ABOUT CLOTHES DRYERS The heating unit went out on my dryer! The
gentleman that fixes things around the house for us told us that he wanted to
show us something and he went over to the dryer and pulled out the lint filter.
It was clean. (I always clean the lint from the filter after every load of
clothes.) He took the filter over to the sink and ran hot water over it. The
lint filter is made of a mesh material . I'm sure you know what your dryer's
lint filter looks like. Well .... the hot water just sat on top of the mesh! It
didn't go through it at all! He told us that dryer sheets cause a film over that
mesh - that's what burns out the heating unit. You can't SEE the film, but it's
there. It's what is in the dryer sheets to make your clothes soft and static
free. You know how they can feel waxy when you take them out of the box ... well
this stuff builds up on your clothes and on your lint screen. This is also what
causes dryer units to potentially burn your house down with it! He said the best
way to keep your dryer working for a very long time (and to keep your electric
bill lower) is to take that filter out and wash it with hot soapy water and an
old toothbrush at least every six months. He said that increases the life of the
dryer at least twice as long! How about that!?! Learn something new every day! I
certainly didn't know dryer sheets would do that. So, I thought I'd share! Note:
I went to my dryer and tested my screen by running water on it. The water ran
through a little bit but mostly collected all the water in the mesh screen. I
washed it with warm soapy water and a nylon brush and I had it done in 30
seconds. Then when I rinsed it .... the water ran right thru the screen! There
wasn't any puddling at all! That repairman knew what he was talking about!

New Hampshire
is seldom ranked first in anything other than primary election dates. However,
Lauren Srelb in Newsweek Magazine asserts that New Hampshire ranks Number
1 among our 50 states in beer "consumption" per capita ---
"Bottoms Up," by Lauren Strelb, Newsweek Magazine, October 10 &
17, 2011, Page 29 ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/02/octoberfest-beer-facts.html

Jensen CommentThis actually
surprises me since New Hampshire has no large cities, no large factories, no
large colleges, no large breweries, no large population of German descendents,
etc. I think this is a statistical fluke attributed to the fact that New
Hampshire has much cheaper alcohol prices than any of its bordering states,
including Canada. And New Hampshire has no sales tax on beer and booze, unlike
all of its neighbors. Outsiders come into New Hampshire to carry off beer, wine,
and booze by the carload. New Hampshire probably has the only selected
interstate exits that go nowhere other than giant liquor stores on I-95 and
I-93, and I-91.

Hence, Lauren
Strelb may be incorrect in concluding that New Hampshire residents "consume" the
most beer. It may be more correct to conclude that New Hampshire "sells" the
most beer per capita to budget-minded couch potatoes who slink back to their
home states.

Other items to note in the study.
Anheuser-Busch brews more beer than the next nine U.S. competitors combined. The
U.S. ranks 15 behind 14 drunker nations headed by the Czech Republic and
Ireland. Americans drink more soft drinks than beer, coffee, and liquor
combined.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its
terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide." The only two higher levels
in France are "Collaborate" and "Surrender." The rise was
precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France 's white flag
factory, effectively paralyzing the country's military capability.

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in
Libya and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed"
to "Peeved." Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again
to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A
Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out.
Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody
Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance"
warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from "Pissed Off" to "Let's
get the Bastards." They don't have any other levels. This is the
reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for
the last 300 years.

Italy has increased the alert level from "Shout Loudly and
Excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing." Two more levels
remain: "Ineffective Combat Operations" and "Change Sides."

The Germans have increased their alert state from "Disdainful
Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs." They also
have two higher levels: "Invade a Neighbor" and "Lose."

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only
threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels .

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to
deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the
new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Australia , meanwhile, has raised its security level from "No
worries" to "She'll be all right, Mate." Two more escalation levels
remain: "Crikey! I think we'll need to cancel the Barbie this
weekend!" and "The Barbie is canceled." So far no situation has ever
warranted use of the final escalation level.

AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc

CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.